Dynamics of decoherence of an entangled pair of qubits locally connected to a one-dimensional disordered spin chain

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium evolution of concurrence of a Bell pair constituted of two qubits, through the measurement of Loschmidt echo (LE) under the scope of generalized central spin model. Having detected the Griffiths phase via derivative of LE in equilibrium, we show that in the non-equilibrium situation, the spin chain requires a temporal window to realize the effect of disorder. We show that within this timescale, LE falls off exponentially and this decay is maximally controlled by the initial states and coupling strength. Our detail investigation suggests that there actually exist three types of exponential decay, a Gaussian decay in ultra short time scale followed by two exponential decay in the intermediate time with two different decay exponents. The effect of the disorder starts appearing in the late time power law fall of LE where the power law exponent is strongly dependent on disorder strength and the final state but almost independent of initial states and coupling strength. This feature allows us to indicate the presence of Griffiths phase. To be precise, continuously varying critical exponent and wide distribution of relaxation time imprint their effect in LE in the late time limit where the power law fall is absent for quenching to a Griffiths phase. Here, LE vanishes following the fast exponential fall. Interestingly, for off-critical quenching LE attains a higher saturation value for increasing disorder strength, otherwise vanishes for a clean spin chain, referring to the fact that disorder prohibits the rapid decay of entanglement in long time limit. Moreover, we show that disorder is also able to destroy the light cone like nature of post quench quasi-particles as LE does not sense the singular time scales appearing for clean spin chain with qubits coupled at symmetric positions.